Mowat, 92, died in his Port Hope home Tuesday afternoon, a representative at Furby House Books in the eastern Ontario town said Wednesday. The store has been selling Mowat's collection of first editions of his own titles.

Born in Belleville, Ont., in 1921, Mowat served in the Second World War before turning to writing as a career in 1949 after spending two years in the Arctic. He has 25 books to his name, including Never Cry Wolf, Westviking, Lost in the Barrens and his memoir, Otherwise.

His books have been translated in more than 20 languages in more than 60 countries. His short stories have also appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Maclean's and Atlantic Monthly.

He was an avid traveller and has lived in or visited "almost every part of Canada," his website says.

He was also a conservationist and environmentalist who divided his time between his home in Port Hope, Ont., and Cape Breton, N.S.

"There's no active role for human beings in conservation; what you do is you find a piece of land, and you just leave it alone," Mowat said after donating 80 hectares of costal land in Cape Breton to a nature conservation group in 2009.

"I believe only nature can do it and that man, despite all his brains, just gets in the way. He's like a monkey wrench thrown into the smoothly oiled machinery of evolution. We screw things up."